Are you ready for this?

Are you ready for this?

This clip of an interview by WMAL with Frederick’s own High Sheriff Chuck Jenkins is something else. The first thing that jumps out is that WMAL can’t spell Frederick County. It’s not Fredrick. Once we recovered from seeing this error, and managed to listen we were excited concerned to hear his thoughts on school security in the wake of Parkland.

He made it clear that he feels the buck stops with him for any actions/inactions done by deputies whom he had trained and that work for him. Our first thought in hearing this was remembering the death of Ethan Saylor. The sheriff may have publicly commented on his feelings about that, but all we could find was that he said they need to revise the way deputies were trained.

O’Connor: I think many people are sort of scrutinizing Sheriff Israel right now because it appears as though he knew about those breakdowns last week, but he still did that nationally televised political event where he was basically blaming the NRA, blaming politicians, he was kind of partisan. Do you think that was appropriate for him?

Sheriff Jenkins: No, I don’t. Again, I think we all have our political beliefs and ideologies but you keep them separate from the actual events that you’re addressing. And some of the statements he said, he made, I don’t think were really appropriate. Again, I wasn’t there. I’m not in his shoes. But I can tell you, you don’t turn a situation like that into politics and you don’t blame the NRA because it’s not a gun control issue. The very basic issues are these:

How do you limit access of firearms to individuals that shouldn’t have them in their hands?

How do we harden the security at our schools to eliminate the threats to our students and staff?

There are a number of ways to do it, but again I don’t think you make it political.

How are guns not a political issue? The sheriff is making it political himself when he mentions limiting access. You can’t limit access without changing laws. Of course this is a political issue.

The sheriff announced plans to bring a proposal to the Board of Education to put an armed and trained security force of 5 or 6 into each and every school. This is how he thinks he will keep our kids safe. We reached out to Karl Bickel, democratic candidate for Frederick County Sheriff to see what he thinks of this idea. Karl didn’t want to give a final opinion on it since it is just a thought at the moment, but he did say it felt like a knee-jerk reaction. “It sounds like an ill-conceived idea that is fraught with problems that would put students, staff and any officers (deputies) in even greater danger.” We tend to agree. We’ll stand by to see what the sheriff presents to the board.